Xdebug 2.2 adds this same functionality to the non-HTML environment: the command line. Now the overloaded var_dump() and native xdebug_var_dump() functions also accept the three aforementioned settings:

Now, to be fair. This is all a side effect; and merely an add-on to a patch by Michael Maclean. He wrote a patch that adds colours to the output on the command line by using ANSI escape codes. This patch also made the overloaded var_dump() listen to the limiting settings for variable display. After his patch, the following was the behaviour on the command line as long as stdout is a tty and xdebug.cli_color is set to 1.

I have extended this so that the settings regarding data display also work without xdebug.cli_color set to 1. Further more, in Xdebug 2.2.0RC1, setting xdebug.cli_color to 2 forces the colours from being shown, even if stdout is not a tty.

Initially, the colour coding of errors and var_dump() output, would only work on a Unix system where ANSI escape codes are commonly supported. After the release of Xdebug 2.2.0RC1, Chris Jones submitted a bug report suggesting that this functionality could also be available on the Windows console. I wasn't aware that Windows could do this anymore since they dropped ANSI.SYS but apparently there is a tool, ANSICON, that reimplements this. From the next release, Xdebug 2.2.0RC2, Xdebug will now also check whether the ANSICON environment variable is set, just like Xdebug would check whether stdout is a tty on a Unix platform. As a result, the equivalent console output as shown before looks like the following on Windows (providing ANSICON is installed):

Now the only thing left is adding complete documentation for this feature ;-)